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Comment by tdees40 | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that under most scenarios water for humans is fine, but agriculture will be totally dead in California.

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Ahh, ok they hinted at that in the article but for some reason it didn't click in my head. I wonder if the farmers will just move to neighboring states (not that it's easy to pick up and move a farm....) losing farms in California would be a huge loss:

> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list [1] goes on and on). [0]

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2...

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/files/2agovstat10_web-1.pdf

> [...] losing farms in California would be a huge loss:

CA produce is not evenly geographically distributed. Production in the coastal ranges is less affected by the drought (compared to the Central Valley), but coastal production is skewed towards fruits and vegetables.

Central Valley production is skewed towards Alfalfa (most of which is exported to China) and Almonds. Both of those are extremely water-intensive to produce and contribute almost no calories to the average American diet (and even less to the poor).

So, cutting off water to Central Valley farmers will have a smaller effect than most predict.

It's not as though the drought just stops at the border of California, so that probably won't be practical.

But the agriculturally impacted area is, essentially, the central valley, which is entirely in California.

There are areas of Oregon and Arizona impacted by the same general drought, but they are a drop in the bucket (pun partially intended).

While true, it's also surprisingly like that- basically, the Sierra Nevadas have been blocking the weather that gave the rest of the country severe flooding last year.

Is this an issue of price? Charging more for water? Or is outright rationing without doing any price hikes the only viable option?

Yes it's an issue of price, but in a market that doesn't function very well. Water, ironically, is not very "liquid" in the economic sense.

Over time, people will have to pay more for their produce. Some farms will shut down and some crops will stop being grown. If the price of water goes high enough, then desalination or new pipelines from wetter areas will start to make sense.

I think so too. There's no reason we have to subsidize agriculture in CA. The one question is do the farmers have some legal claim or right to access the water at non-market rates?

This. What it really means is that we won't be able to grow crops in the desert which is the central valley region. And that means that prices for foods will go up, and we'll not be able to use the corn belt for just corn, or conversely growing something other than corn there will be more profitable.

It really is too bad we couldn't build a water pipeline of some scale to help folks like Boston out with their excess snow.

Which would still be absolutely catastrophic considering how much of US (and world, for that matter) supplies of produce come from CA.

Not really. If the US opened up its agricultural markets much more to the rest of the world, there will be no shortage of suppliers. Problem is that to sell crops to the US there is a maze of regulations and tariffs.

and the practise of subsidies to over produce then forcibly dump the product on other countries, decimating their local farming economies as they are not allowed to add import tariffs and subsidize their industries as that is anti-competitive

Which in turn means US will have to do with about 50% less vegetable/crop to consume.

No, because the price would go up and some of the crop would get grown in other states. Hard to say what the exact percentage would stabilize at, though, and it certainly takes a long time to plant orchards, etc.

But what is the percentage of income taken by produce? Not very high, I'd guess. Probably affect the poor the most.

Some crops would take years to rebound, like nuts, which are both water intensive and take years to mature.

The US is a net food exporter by a large margin.

Because humans don't eat, right?

What's far more interesting is that that will result in massive numbers of unemployed non-citizen farm workers right after Obama grants them work permits by executive order.

And that's going to happen right before the 2016 presidential election.

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